An Italian feast as Cooked by Edith of Hedingham aka Jenny Sawyer
Focus of the feast:
This feast was given at Drachenwald's Kingdom University in October 2016, in the Elizabethan manor of Ufton Court. My aim in creating this menu was to use later period (typically 15th century) Italian recipes to give a proper Italian feast, although I did add the very English roast beef as a small nod to the house and the location. The obvious place to start for Italian recipes was with Scappi and Platina, however I was keen to use some of the recipes from Martino da Como, who was chef to a cardinal in Rome in the 1460s/1470s. He was friends with Platina who would go on to print number of Martino's recipes.
The recipes I used were designed to give a range of flavours and textures, to give a sense of the foods of the period as well a satisfying and complete meal to all who sat at table that day.
I have listed below some of key recipes from the meal in the translated/redacted form taken from the books listed in the bibliography at the end. I have added commentary to the recipes on what worked / didn't work and some of the key changes I made.
The menu was designed to give a good mixture of meat, carbohydrates, vegetable proteins, vegetables and starches. Each course should have a mixture of each of these. The first course had a more savoury focus with the centre piece of the roast beef and a good selection of vegetable dishes, and dairy in the cheese gnocchi. The pear tart worked well in the first course as it wasn't overly sweet and had the clean flavour of the pears. The intercourse lemon salad was included as palate cleanser and gave the dinners a suitable pause in the meal. The second course had a lighter and sweeter focus, with the white meat of the chicken, the salad, aubergines, and the beans. The second course finished with the angel food, biscotti and the apple tart.
Menu.
1st course
Lentil pottage
Roast beef served with mustard and galantine sauce
Stuffed cabbages with nuts
Cheese Gnocchi
Cauliflower
Whole pear tart -
Intercourse cleanser
Lemon salad - lemons & sugar
2nd Course
Chicken with verjuice
Grand sallad -
Beans
Aubergine with herbs
Ravioli
Angel Food & Biscotti
Apple tart in the French style
Recipes with commentary
Stuffed cabbages with nuts - Martino
Take the hazelnuts and some piacentine cheese two cloves of garlic crushed together with the ingredients good herbs , well crushed marjoram mint and parsley with walnuts then take 2 eggs that have been beaten finely chopped veal fat with pepper and saffron and season generously with pepper use this paste to make a load then take some cabbage leaves as they say in Lombady and wet this with warm water then enclose the loaf so nothing can spill out then cook with other cabbages leave and as soon as done
Commentary - This recipe worked considerably better than I had expected it to. I changed the mix of herbs due to the availability of marjoram and removed the veal fat in order to make it suitable for vegetarians. I had intended to use butter, however, it was not required as the eggs and cheese combined well enough that it was easy to create a paste for stuffing. I used string to close the parcels and to ensure they stayed together. You could read the recipe as either individual parcels (as I did) or as a large whole cabbage parcel! I also removed the saffron for cost purposes.
Cheese Gnocchi (The Medieval Kitchen)
If you want some gnocchi, take some fresh cheese and mash it, then take some flour and mix with egg yolks as in make miglicci. Put a pot full of water on the fire and when it begins to boil put the mixture on a dish and drip into the pot with a ladle. When they are cooked, place them on dishes and sprinkle with plenty of grated cheese.
Commentary - this recipe is in the Medieval kitchen book, which focuses on French and Italian recipes. Gnocchi is the Italian word for dumplings, and there are various recipes for small dumplings, Scappi's recipe is just breadcrumbs and eggs, and typically added to soups, as small pasta (orzo) is added to modern Italian soups. This recipe uses cream cheese with the flour and the eggs (it works as well with whole eggs rather than yolks) gives the closest to a modern potato gnocchi that I've found, it is light, fluffy and very tasty! They freeze very well and cook the same as modern gnocchi - when they rise to the top, they are done! Serve with melted butter, sage leaves and parmesan or pecorino cheese. Good for a feast or a weekday meal!
To Cook cauliflower (Martino)
Take a cauliflower and cut it away from the stalk making several bits. Boil salted water. With the cauliflower done into bits put into the boiling water. Do not overcook it but take out and put in dish. Then get boiling oil and drip it hot with spoon over the cauliflower adding pepper and a little of broth in which it was cooked. Serve it hot otherwise it is not good. You can also sauté a crushed clove of garlic in the oil to flavour the Cauliflower.
Commentary - A very simple but effective way of serving a cauliflower. This recipe would work as well with other similar vegetables - broccoli or asparagus for example. I cooked the cauliflower in salted water due to some allergy issues with vegetable stock, but using the stock would add depth to the vegetable.
Whole pear tart (Martino)
Pies of raw pears - Stand three large pears in a pie and fill the gaps with about 4 ounces of sugar. Coat well and glaze with eggs or saffron and put in the oven
Commentary - An excellent recipe, the simplicity of the cooking really, allowed the pear and sugar to combine and the tastes to come through. I used a standard butter short crust pastry, rolled quite thin. I glazed with egg rather than saffron for cost issues. It is very difficult to make this pie look pretty but it tastes amazing!
Chicken with verjuice (Martino)
To make boiled pullet with verjuice, the pullet needs to be cooked with a bit of salt cured meat. When half-cooked take some whole verjuice grapes and cut in half removing their seeds and cook together with the pullet. When done cooking take a bit of finely chopped parsley, mint, pepper and saffron. and all these things together with the pullet and the broth on a platter and serve
Commentary - I used chicken thighs as they keep their moisture and are very flavourful. I was unable to get verjuice grapes so I used verjuice instead, however the verjuice we sourced was too bitter for the broth. So, I cut the verjuice with white wine to give a better taste.
Beans (Martino)
Cook the beans in pure water or good broth. when they are done take some onions that have been thinly sliced and fry in a pan with good oil and top with the fried onions and with pepper and cinnamon and saffron. Then let them set over hot ash for a little while. Serve in bowls topped with good spices.
Commentary - The beans were cooked in a slow cooker for around 4 /5 hours. In order to stop the beans from drying out during the cooking process, the water had to be topped up regularly. The resultant dish was a bean pottage with a consistency of mushy peas. Served with the fried onions on top it gave the dish a good mixture of textures. This is an excellent recipe in many ways as it is simply, very tasty and crucially is suitable for practically all persons, even those with extreme allergies.
Aubergine with herbs (Scappi)
Get eggplants that are not too ripe or too bitter and clean of the purplish skin they have - although you do find white ones - and cut them lengthwise into several pieces. Let them steep for a half and hour, discard the water and set them to boil in a pot in fresh water that is lightly salted. When they are well cooked take out and it them drain on a table. Have an earthenware baking dish or a torte pan ready with oil. Carefully flour the pieces and make a layer them in the pan. Get beaten mint, marjoram and parsley and beaten fresh fennel tops or ground fennel along with crush garlic cloves and scatter all that over the layer of eggplant as well as enough pepper cinnamon cloves and salt, splash verjuice on that and sprinkle it with sugar. Repeat making up 2 or 3 layers. Cook it the way a tort is done. When it is done serve it hot in a dishes with broth over
Commentary - this was the least successful of the recipes cooked that day. It was dry and the broth didn't help. I think in future it would take out the boiling stage so after soaking I would create the torte dishes and then cook and serve with the veg broth.
Ravioli (Martino)
Take a libra of good parmesan cheese and another good fatty cheese. then take some good herbs. that is to say chard, mint and saffron. Crush well together and once that have been crushed they have been crushed boil or fry in good butter. Then mix together with the cheese and incorporate well and make them fat with butter. Make a thin pasta and encase the filling in it and making the ravioli as long as good a sized finger and a little wider. ,
Commentary - The pasta was made ahead of the event and frozen. This enabled a large amount of homemade and home stuffed pasta to be made and then cooked quickly from frozen and served with butter and cheese. The ravioli recipes you typically see in Italian recipe books are practically unchanged from the recipes you see today. This means that you can serve a 100% period dish that will not shock modern palates. For the cheese for serving and the stuffing we used pecorino cheese as it was also fine for those with lactose issues.
Apple tart in the French style (Martino)
Cook the apples as above (stewed and strained) take some well-crushed pine nuts and add the apples to them with a generous amount of sugar, cinnamon, ginger, saffron and a little well crushed pike roe and thin everything together with rose water or other water before squeezing through a strainer to make it thicker but not too much so then make a dough thinner with a little oil, sugar, water and salt and making it hard but allowing it be elastic. Make this dough which is make with ingredients mentioned above the thickness of a finger and it should be cook in the oven or in a pan over a low heat then have some wafers make with sugar and turn them into powder with a little sugar and pulverize and sprinkle with rose water.
Commentary - An excellent apple pie with a good mixture of flavours from the apple and the rose water. Again, I didn't use the saffron for reasons of cost. I also took out the pine nuts, and pike roe to ease the allergies/dietary requirement issues. However, the pine nuts would give a texture to the apple. I used a standard short crust pastry which was blind baked before adding the stewed apples. I also used commercial wafers instead of making the wafers myself. This was a matter of cost and time, as it would not have been possible to make wafers for 120 people on the day, with the staff and facilities we had.
The pie was served with Angel Food, a simple mixture of mascarpone cheese and honey - frankly what's not to love! The recipe for this came from the Libre de Sent Sovi, a 14th century Catalan manuscript.
Biscotti (Scappi)
To prepare dainty morsels – that is, Milanese-style mostaccioli get fifteen fresh eggs, beat them in a casserole pot and strain them with two and a half pounds of fine, powdered sugar, half an ounce of raw aniseed or else ground coriander, and a grain or two of fine musk; with that put two and a half pounds of flour… Then have greased sheets of paper ready, made like lamps, or else high-sided torte pans with, on the bottom, then put the batter into the lamps or torte pans, filling them no more than the thickness of a finger. Sprinkle them immediately with sugar and put into a hot oven…When that batter has risen up and thoroughly dried out and is rather firm take it out of the torte pan or lamp. Right away with a broad, sharp knife cut them up into slices two fingers wide and as long as you like, and put them back into the oven on sheets of paper to bake again like biscuits, turning them over often.
Commentary - the above is a Scappi recipe and I used the redaction of this from this website (https://nasossong.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/scappis-mostaccioli-easter-biscotti/). Scappi has aniseed, coriander, fennel and musk as the flavourings. As personally I don't like aniseed, coriander or fennel and, frankly, musk is hard to find, I chose to flavour the biscotti with rose water for one batch and nutmeg for the other, as both are completely period appropriate flavours.
Bibliography
1 - The Medieval Kitchen ; Recipes from France and Italy by Odile Redon, Francoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi, published by The University of Chicago Press, 1998
2 - The art of cooking, the first modern cookery book; the eminent Maestro Martinon of Como. Edited with an introduction by Luigo Ballerini. Translated and Annotated by Jeremy Parzen. published by University of California Press, 2005
3 - The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570), translated with commentary by Terence Scully. Published by University of Toronto press incorporated, 2008
Focus of the feast:
This feast was given at Drachenwald's Kingdom University in October 2016, in the Elizabethan manor of Ufton Court. My aim in creating this menu was to use later period (typically 15th century) Italian recipes to give a proper Italian feast, although I did add the very English roast beef as a small nod to the house and the location. The obvious place to start for Italian recipes was with Scappi and Platina, however I was keen to use some of the recipes from Martino da Como, who was chef to a cardinal in Rome in the 1460s/1470s. He was friends with Platina who would go on to print number of Martino's recipes.
The recipes I used were designed to give a range of flavours and textures, to give a sense of the foods of the period as well a satisfying and complete meal to all who sat at table that day.
I have listed below some of key recipes from the meal in the translated/redacted form taken from the books listed in the bibliography at the end. I have added commentary to the recipes on what worked / didn't work and some of the key changes I made.
The menu was designed to give a good mixture of meat, carbohydrates, vegetable proteins, vegetables and starches. Each course should have a mixture of each of these. The first course had a more savoury focus with the centre piece of the roast beef and a good selection of vegetable dishes, and dairy in the cheese gnocchi. The pear tart worked well in the first course as it wasn't overly sweet and had the clean flavour of the pears. The intercourse lemon salad was included as palate cleanser and gave the dinners a suitable pause in the meal. The second course had a lighter and sweeter focus, with the white meat of the chicken, the salad, aubergines, and the beans. The second course finished with the angel food, biscotti and the apple tart.
Menu.
1st course
Lentil pottage
Roast beef served with mustard and galantine sauce
Stuffed cabbages with nuts
Cheese Gnocchi
Cauliflower
Whole pear tart -
Intercourse cleanser
Lemon salad - lemons & sugar
2nd Course
Chicken with verjuice
Grand sallad -
Beans
Aubergine with herbs
Ravioli
Angel Food & Biscotti
Apple tart in the French style
Recipes with commentary
Stuffed cabbages with nuts - Martino
Take the hazelnuts and some piacentine cheese two cloves of garlic crushed together with the ingredients good herbs , well crushed marjoram mint and parsley with walnuts then take 2 eggs that have been beaten finely chopped veal fat with pepper and saffron and season generously with pepper use this paste to make a load then take some cabbage leaves as they say in Lombady and wet this with warm water then enclose the loaf so nothing can spill out then cook with other cabbages leave and as soon as done
Commentary - This recipe worked considerably better than I had expected it to. I changed the mix of herbs due to the availability of marjoram and removed the veal fat in order to make it suitable for vegetarians. I had intended to use butter, however, it was not required as the eggs and cheese combined well enough that it was easy to create a paste for stuffing. I used string to close the parcels and to ensure they stayed together. You could read the recipe as either individual parcels (as I did) or as a large whole cabbage parcel! I also removed the saffron for cost purposes.
Cheese Gnocchi (The Medieval Kitchen)
If you want some gnocchi, take some fresh cheese and mash it, then take some flour and mix with egg yolks as in make miglicci. Put a pot full of water on the fire and when it begins to boil put the mixture on a dish and drip into the pot with a ladle. When they are cooked, place them on dishes and sprinkle with plenty of grated cheese.
Commentary - this recipe is in the Medieval kitchen book, which focuses on French and Italian recipes. Gnocchi is the Italian word for dumplings, and there are various recipes for small dumplings, Scappi's recipe is just breadcrumbs and eggs, and typically added to soups, as small pasta (orzo) is added to modern Italian soups. This recipe uses cream cheese with the flour and the eggs (it works as well with whole eggs rather than yolks) gives the closest to a modern potato gnocchi that I've found, it is light, fluffy and very tasty! They freeze very well and cook the same as modern gnocchi - when they rise to the top, they are done! Serve with melted butter, sage leaves and parmesan or pecorino cheese. Good for a feast or a weekday meal!
To Cook cauliflower (Martino)
Take a cauliflower and cut it away from the stalk making several bits. Boil salted water. With the cauliflower done into bits put into the boiling water. Do not overcook it but take out and put in dish. Then get boiling oil and drip it hot with spoon over the cauliflower adding pepper and a little of broth in which it was cooked. Serve it hot otherwise it is not good. You can also sauté a crushed clove of garlic in the oil to flavour the Cauliflower.
Commentary - A very simple but effective way of serving a cauliflower. This recipe would work as well with other similar vegetables - broccoli or asparagus for example. I cooked the cauliflower in salted water due to some allergy issues with vegetable stock, but using the stock would add depth to the vegetable.
Whole pear tart (Martino)
Pies of raw pears - Stand three large pears in a pie and fill the gaps with about 4 ounces of sugar. Coat well and glaze with eggs or saffron and put in the oven
Commentary - An excellent recipe, the simplicity of the cooking really, allowed the pear and sugar to combine and the tastes to come through. I used a standard butter short crust pastry, rolled quite thin. I glazed with egg rather than saffron for cost issues. It is very difficult to make this pie look pretty but it tastes amazing!
Chicken with verjuice (Martino)
To make boiled pullet with verjuice, the pullet needs to be cooked with a bit of salt cured meat. When half-cooked take some whole verjuice grapes and cut in half removing their seeds and cook together with the pullet. When done cooking take a bit of finely chopped parsley, mint, pepper and saffron. and all these things together with the pullet and the broth on a platter and serve
Commentary - I used chicken thighs as they keep their moisture and are very flavourful. I was unable to get verjuice grapes so I used verjuice instead, however the verjuice we sourced was too bitter for the broth. So, I cut the verjuice with white wine to give a better taste.
Beans (Martino)
Cook the beans in pure water or good broth. when they are done take some onions that have been thinly sliced and fry in a pan with good oil and top with the fried onions and with pepper and cinnamon and saffron. Then let them set over hot ash for a little while. Serve in bowls topped with good spices.
Commentary - The beans were cooked in a slow cooker for around 4 /5 hours. In order to stop the beans from drying out during the cooking process, the water had to be topped up regularly. The resultant dish was a bean pottage with a consistency of mushy peas. Served with the fried onions on top it gave the dish a good mixture of textures. This is an excellent recipe in many ways as it is simply, very tasty and crucially is suitable for practically all persons, even those with extreme allergies.
Aubergine with herbs (Scappi)
Get eggplants that are not too ripe or too bitter and clean of the purplish skin they have - although you do find white ones - and cut them lengthwise into several pieces. Let them steep for a half and hour, discard the water and set them to boil in a pot in fresh water that is lightly salted. When they are well cooked take out and it them drain on a table. Have an earthenware baking dish or a torte pan ready with oil. Carefully flour the pieces and make a layer them in the pan. Get beaten mint, marjoram and parsley and beaten fresh fennel tops or ground fennel along with crush garlic cloves and scatter all that over the layer of eggplant as well as enough pepper cinnamon cloves and salt, splash verjuice on that and sprinkle it with sugar. Repeat making up 2 or 3 layers. Cook it the way a tort is done. When it is done serve it hot in a dishes with broth over
Commentary - this was the least successful of the recipes cooked that day. It was dry and the broth didn't help. I think in future it would take out the boiling stage so after soaking I would create the torte dishes and then cook and serve with the veg broth.
Ravioli (Martino)
Take a libra of good parmesan cheese and another good fatty cheese. then take some good herbs. that is to say chard, mint and saffron. Crush well together and once that have been crushed they have been crushed boil or fry in good butter. Then mix together with the cheese and incorporate well and make them fat with butter. Make a thin pasta and encase the filling in it and making the ravioli as long as good a sized finger and a little wider. ,
Commentary - The pasta was made ahead of the event and frozen. This enabled a large amount of homemade and home stuffed pasta to be made and then cooked quickly from frozen and served with butter and cheese. The ravioli recipes you typically see in Italian recipe books are practically unchanged from the recipes you see today. This means that you can serve a 100% period dish that will not shock modern palates. For the cheese for serving and the stuffing we used pecorino cheese as it was also fine for those with lactose issues.
Apple tart in the French style (Martino)
Cook the apples as above (stewed and strained) take some well-crushed pine nuts and add the apples to them with a generous amount of sugar, cinnamon, ginger, saffron and a little well crushed pike roe and thin everything together with rose water or other water before squeezing through a strainer to make it thicker but not too much so then make a dough thinner with a little oil, sugar, water and salt and making it hard but allowing it be elastic. Make this dough which is make with ingredients mentioned above the thickness of a finger and it should be cook in the oven or in a pan over a low heat then have some wafers make with sugar and turn them into powder with a little sugar and pulverize and sprinkle with rose water.
Commentary - An excellent apple pie with a good mixture of flavours from the apple and the rose water. Again, I didn't use the saffron for reasons of cost. I also took out the pine nuts, and pike roe to ease the allergies/dietary requirement issues. However, the pine nuts would give a texture to the apple. I used a standard short crust pastry which was blind baked before adding the stewed apples. I also used commercial wafers instead of making the wafers myself. This was a matter of cost and time, as it would not have been possible to make wafers for 120 people on the day, with the staff and facilities we had.
The pie was served with Angel Food, a simple mixture of mascarpone cheese and honey - frankly what's not to love! The recipe for this came from the Libre de Sent Sovi, a 14th century Catalan manuscript.
Biscotti (Scappi)
To prepare dainty morsels – that is, Milanese-style mostaccioli get fifteen fresh eggs, beat them in a casserole pot and strain them with two and a half pounds of fine, powdered sugar, half an ounce of raw aniseed or else ground coriander, and a grain or two of fine musk; with that put two and a half pounds of flour… Then have greased sheets of paper ready, made like lamps, or else high-sided torte pans with, on the bottom, then put the batter into the lamps or torte pans, filling them no more than the thickness of a finger. Sprinkle them immediately with sugar and put into a hot oven…When that batter has risen up and thoroughly dried out and is rather firm take it out of the torte pan or lamp. Right away with a broad, sharp knife cut them up into slices two fingers wide and as long as you like, and put them back into the oven on sheets of paper to bake again like biscuits, turning them over often.
Commentary - the above is a Scappi recipe and I used the redaction of this from this website (https://nasossong.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/scappis-mostaccioli-easter-biscotti/). Scappi has aniseed, coriander, fennel and musk as the flavourings. As personally I don't like aniseed, coriander or fennel and, frankly, musk is hard to find, I chose to flavour the biscotti with rose water for one batch and nutmeg for the other, as both are completely period appropriate flavours.
Bibliography
1 - The Medieval Kitchen ; Recipes from France and Italy by Odile Redon, Francoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi, published by The University of Chicago Press, 1998
2 - The art of cooking, the first modern cookery book; the eminent Maestro Martinon of Como. Edited with an introduction by Luigo Ballerini. Translated and Annotated by Jeremy Parzen. published by University of California Press, 2005
3 - The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570), translated with commentary by Terence Scully. Published by University of Toronto press incorporated, 2008